Does anyone else reflect on 'Closer to Cleopatra than...' moments in their personal lives?

[Thurien]

We are told we are closer in time to Cleopatra today than when the first pyramids were built. Then there is Tyrannosaurus Rex which we are closer to than Stegosaurus.

Interesting enough, but what blows my mind more is time distances in my own life. Today I took a detour through the village where I was born and where I returned to live with my young family. There, one of the DC's and I sat on a small hill by the wood's edge and watched young squirrels playing. DC was about 3 and shreiking with joy as they gambled about.

As I drove through today, I reflected that my own early years seemed like a whole eternity before DC came along. It was really like a different life. Yet from the squirrels to now seems like just a decade or two, but still very much connected to now.

Anyone else get these type of thoughts?

Greenland sharks live up to 500 years !!

Easily. Lots of women had children at very young ages.

1960s are 54 years ago.

I remember my dad listening to 60s music in the 90s and thinking he was well sad.
Now I'm the saddo listening to 90s music in the 2020s!

And some people will span 3 centuries. ie, born in the 20th century in 1998, alive all through the 21st century, goes on to live til 107 - (so dies in 2105.) !!!

Yeah, I was born less than 20 years after the end of WW2 which is almost 80 years ago now. 😱

Yes! I feel like 20 years ago was actually about 5 years ago, and then I think if I go forward 20 years, I'll nearly be 70, and I don't want to be 70 that quickly!

The sitcom FRIENDS which still feels quite current and still very funny (IMO) started THIRTY YEARS AGO! THIRTY YEARS AGO!!!!!!!!!

I remember I knew someone when I was much younger (I'm in my 50s) their grandad had fought in the Battle of Trafalgar !!!

Yeah - I heard Cry Me a River by Justin Timberlake a few days ago, and was gobsmacked when the DJ announced it was out TWENTY TWO YEARS AGO! (2002.) I would have sworn it was around 10 years ago that it was out.

In the mid 1990s, I don't ever recall hearing a song from the early to mid 1970s and thinking THAT was only 10 years ago. The songs from 1972-1977-ish felt really old in the mid 1990s, and it seemed donkeys years since they were out.

WTF is THAT about?

Like you, I really struggle to process the fact that the 21st century started almost a QUARTER of a CENTURY ago.

Another funny one (for me) is that the film GREASE, which was set in the 1950s (1959 actually,) seemed like another age and another time, when it was out in 1978. Yet it was set just 19 years before it was released.

That's like a film being set in 2005 now. That feels like the very recent past. Yet 1959 and 1978 seemed like many decades, and many worlds - apart.

What I find weird is the timelines.
Like House came out 20 years ago.
But my mam died in 2000,toe them timelines don't add up because I swear House only came out about 10 years ago.
Or watching a film from the 40, or 50s and realising most of the actors were born in the last century and are dead as long as I'm alive

The first man in space, 1961, is closer in time to the Wright brothers flight, 1903, than it it to us.

It seems weird that I was born 27 years after world war 2 ended. 27 years ago I was 24, which doesn’t seem very long ago but world war 2 always seemed like it was in the distant past.

I was a teenager in the mid seventies. The second world war seemed like ancient history. But mid seventies is now 50 years ago. The equivalent when I was a teenager was the mid twenties. Your sense of time really does change as you get older.

I read that in one of dd's school books. Just googled and it says

The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make stone tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years[1] and ended between 4,000 BC and 2,000 BC, with the advent of metalworking.[2] It therefore represents nearly 99.3% of human history.

My 96 yr old Grandad died a few years back. At his funeral they said something about his mother Mary, and it occurred to me that I never asked him about her. For some reason I kept thinking about her, this woman born sometime in the 1890s. What were her hopes for him, what was her life like. We are two women inhabiting such wildly different lives but we loved the same person. It still blows my mind and I think of her sometimes.

Ooh this thread just reminded me of something I was thinking about a few weeks ago: when I was in my early teens in the 90s one of my classmates had a baby. I was wondering how they were doing and then it hit me that her baby is now over 30 🤯

Have you ever heard the clock analogy? My ds told me this.

If all life on earth is a clock, humans arrive at 11.59pm.

I cannot process this.

lol yes my year of birth is nearer the end of WW2 than it is to now and realising that blew my mind last year.

That's astonishing!!

My great grandfather was born a few years after Napoleon died.

"All four of my grandparents were born before Irish independence"

Same here and it blows my mind.

My maternal grandfather was born in 1895 and so was a teenager during Scott's Terra Nova Expedition, and a young man when Shackleton was leading his crew away from the Endurance across the ice. Emily Davison threw herself in front of the king's horse in the year he turned 18- although he could not vote himself yet as you had to be 21.

I was just thinking about this the other day. One son is 14 and he very much sees 9/11 as a historical event, whereas to me, it still seems very recent and current. But the equivalent in my teen life is events happening in the mid to late 1960s while I was in 1991 - which would have felt like a lifetime before.

I also remember going to 50th anniversary of D Day events in my late teens and there being lots of veterans there (including my own grandparents) and yet now the numbers are vanishingly small.

At school in the 90s we had to interview someone who had been in the second world war about their memories. There were a few old people knocking about I could choose from. Now that would be practically impossible.

@garlictwist my son recently had a school trip to the Jewish Museum and they had someone there who had survived a concentration camp. He was in his 80s and had been 2 or 3 at the time. I hope this is something he can look back on when he’s middle aged in the same way that I would think about seeing someone from the Victorian age.